1956 Meyer-Optik Görlitz Trioplan 50mm f/2.9

There's a Kickstarter to bring back the Trioplan lens and its "bubble bokeh" and if you help them kickstart it, you can get $700 off their $1700 lens. Or, you can pick up a 50mm on eBay for ~$150. Which is what I did. German engineering and all that.

The lens arrived with a completely useless original velvet-lined leather lens cap, but I was able to Amazon a UV filter and a lens cap for its odd filter size (Ø35.5mm) where functionality triumphs. As usual, the 1.6x crop-sensor of the Rebel SL1 effectively turns this lens into an 80mm prime, which is still adequate for portraiture, albeit without the bubble bokeh its known for. That's not as easy to orchestrate, but given the opportunity, I'll try.

In that note, my daughter is getting tired of being my go-to girl for lens testing. She wants me to use her brother. The problem is, I explain, she's a natural at posing - always has been. And my son, to put it nicely, is not.

I did get to run this lens through its paces more thoroughly than the other ones at time of posting, and its one of my favorite (so far) for its famous bubbly bokeh, though I will stick to the Mamiya-Sekor 50mm f/2 for its creamy focus if I'm shooting portraits - otherwise I hate the colors. The Meyer-Optik Görlitz seems far more adept at discerning colors, where as the Mamiya-Sekor is very low-contrast.

As usual, there are two examples of this magnificent lens under the cut. An HDR of my grandfather-in-law taken this afternoon, followed by the aforementioned bokeh shot taken in the yard of my house in Newton Kansas this evening.